Ant species cultivates coffee for accommodation | Hacker News Reader

Ant species cultivates coffee for accommodation

dw.com

156 pointsarunc59 comments

I'm surprised there isn't a mention of caffeine in the article linked here.

Caffeine is an insecticide, and I'm willing to bet it plays a role in this relationship by providing ant housing that other insects find generally unpalatable to be around.

This bit seems odd:

"This is the first ant to build its own home," says Susanne Renner, a botanist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Surely this is a misquote or otherwise out of context, because it's obviously not true.

Should read: "This is the first ant to plant its future home."

Even that doesn't appear to be true, though: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/on-fiji-ants-have-lea...

EDIT: I'm dumb, same ants.

This DW article seems to be a poor regurgitation of the arstechnica one (which includes the proper link to the research).

Same research.

I'm curious if its the first animal to plant its future home too.

Who would've guessed that ant makes java in nature as well!

It's continually frustrating that articles like this don't link to the original research. In the age of Sci-Hub, research is so much more accessible than ever before. More non-academic traffic to publishers' sites might even encourage them to offer sensible legal ways of getting hold of papers too, as JSTOR have.

I couldn't immediately find a DOI for this -- it's possible, of course, that it's unpublished (it sounds like PhD work). That would be useful to know, too, though.

The paper is called, "Obligate plant farming by a specialized ant". (doi:10.1038/nplants.2016.181)

http://www.nature.com/articles/nplants2016181

Brilliant: thank you!

What I find interesting and not mentioned in the article is the implications that follow from the fact that coffee is not native to Fiji. So, either the ants came with the coffee to Fiji having perfected the art in a different location. Or despite it so, that both species are 3 million years old, this behaviour is only a few hundred years old.

I was wondering the same thing. My first thought was that perhaps here "coffee" is being used in this popular press article as a shorthand for a relative of the coffee plant, but I haven't been curious enough to dig up the five "coffee" species names and research them. I'm not particularly knowledgable about coffee (I'm not even sure if arabica is a sub-species or proper species), but I would be surprised if there are 5 proper species of coffee used commercially.

There are a lot of species in the genus Coffea, and multiple ones (not sure how many) are used commercially, but the vast vast majority (probably >98%) on the market is either robusta or arabica (which are different species).

Ant intelligence is often attributed to simple rule following behaviour and the ability to make the next ant adapt to what you have already done, for example they optimize the path to some food-source by leaving scent trails that will fade if no ants travel the road.

They've also been known to measure the size of enclosed areas by simply following the outer boundary until they find the initial starting point/entrance again and somehow using the time or effort it took, to be a measure of the size of the place.

It seems to be different species of ants having different behaviours, so maybe they're just stupid rule followers as one might first think. Now if we could make one species of ants learn from and adapt behaviour from another species, then there's no doubt they possess intelligence. And if they're not intelligent, should we attribute the ingeniousness these tiny buggers display to evolution instead?

You can test this by rearing a generation of ants with no contact with the previous generation and see if they exhibit the same behavior.

My bet would be on that it's all innate. I haven't seen examples of intergenerational knowledge transmission in anything other than primates. (Maybe because primate offspring spend much a long time growing up to be adults which gives them time to learn)

As someone who have seen a lot of wildlife documentaries, I have to disagree. I've seen of lot of cases of parents showing how to find food, how to hunt or find shelter, etc. Most animals are able to learn at least in their youth.

yes but ants are insects, not mammals. Insects have crazy amounts of children and their birthing patterns don't probably don't translate well to learning by example as the parent doesn't have time to teach all the children. I think the innateness is a more likely cause.

Actually the founder of the field sociobiology (or at least the main popularizer) is EO Wilson. He studies ants, and since he effectively founded the field, many scientists who study mammals actually studied under him since there wasn't an established place for sociobiology then.

Of course intelligence and sociology/social behavior are different; however, they virtually always have overlaps if any complex intelligence is to occur. It's because you need intergenerational culture to exist in order to build up such knowledge.

EO Wilson and others have proven such intergenerational knowledge transfer exists in ants.

Intelligence doesn't need to occur at an individual level. The hive can be intelligent through emergent properties and can also maintain state that acts like memory for learned experiences.

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/12-wilson-says-ants-liv... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson http://www.pbs.org/program/eo-wilson/

Fascinating. Is there a book that you recommend to read more about this?

I said this because in the parent comment, he said "anything other than primates". I agree it is different for insects and as far as we know they do not seem to learn from others.

Kittens are taught how to hunt for food by their mother. A lot of that behavior is instinctual, but a good chunk of it is learned. A cat who hasn't been taught to hunt will not be as good at it, and may not realize that the result is edible.

Crows will learn basic techniques from each other, like the crows in Japan that drop nuts on crosswalks so car tires will crush the shells, which seems to have started in a single area in Tokyo and spread out from there.

I've watched crows drop walnuts above a road and immediately dive to pick up the cracked shells before the waiting magpies can swoop in. Both appear to be learned strategies.

I've observed my dog adopting a behavior learned just from watching another dog for a few minutes: sticking her whole head under water, sometimes for as long as 20 or thirty seconds and pulling up a rock from a creek.

She watched another dog doing this for a few minutes then decided she wanted to as well. Before this, she dipped at most her muzzle into the creek.

And sure, that's just one example but your claim was too restrictive.

I'm glad I said a wrong thing on hackernews because I'm learning so many new things :)

"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer." — Cunningham's Law

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law

Cockatoos have been seen to learn tool use from another cockatoo, though I think you could probably attempt to argue otherwise.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28990335

Some species appear to also count steps. A researcher glued stilts to ants legs after leaving the anthill and they would go past it in their return and get lost (or so I remember reading in "the math book").

Could it also be possible that the stilt-wearing ant was too far off the ground to smell its colony, or maybe it deemed itself defective and quarantined itself?

They also shortened legs, with the reverse effect. Desert ants cannot use scent because scents evaporate too fast in deserts (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060629-ants-..., http://inspiringscience.net/2012/11/09/do-ants-really-count-...)

Possibly. I didn't read the linked paper, just the little article about it in this pop-sci book.

Regardless, the point is that humans are not the only beings who measure quantitatively.

Reminds me of a silly story: http://jokes.cc.com/funny-doctor/fj9nmq/the-scientist-and-th...

It also seems possible that the stilts would frustrate effort measurement.

There are ants that harvest leafs in order to cultivate fungus as well as well as ants that cultivate aphids, so cultivating something else is really not that surprising. That said, ants are cool and coffee is cool and I'm glad I've now read about their intersection.

The striking difference here, at least to me, is the a matter of scale and delay. Aphids and fungus are smaller than the ants, and have shorter lifecycles than the ants themselves. Planting and cultivation of a coffee plant suggests understanding of much larger scale (both literally and conceptually).

I don't know if understanding is the right word to use.

Over time the ants have acquired a series of triggers and actions that have (apparently) made them more fit to survive.

They don't necessarily understand that for example that planting and fertilizing seeds will yield a safe place to live, they are just driven to take those actions when they encounter whatever trigger those seeds activate in them.

For example when an ant dies it puts off oleic acid and when others pick up on this scent they cart if off to a "burial" site.

However the ants don't understand death. If you coat a live ant with oleic acid the ants will carry it off even as it resists and tries to clean itself and dump it in the dead pile.

Collective intelligence is a strange concept to work with because the ant isn't really the animal, the animal is the colony.

Even still I don't know that the colony "understands" what is happening, it just feels a collective drive to take the actions.

Even without an Ego it is still impressive. Just imagine the steps that led to transmit these traits. How did the first ones know that by planting a seed a plant would grow? How did they know that by adding soil it would help to the growth of the plant? Ants are so perfectly in harmony with the colony that I can't imagine how an ant would step into botany without external input; they don't have time to try new things, they're always doing a task for the greater good of the colony.

I wouldn't say they don't have the time or resources. At any given point there are a fair number of ants that are effectively waiting in reserve for something that requires their attention.

Don't get me wrong, it's quite impressive.

Still, considering how fastidious ants are about cleaning in and around their nests* it's quite feasible one or more colonies might take to disposing of seeds in a way that lets the seeds grow and/or pick up on the habit of dumping waste products on the seedlings which the plants then use as fertilizer.

One thing that shouldn't be ignored is that it could work the other way as well. Maybe a seed was made one day that carried chemicals which caused the ants to plant it and/or poop on it.

There's evidence of this sort of thing with moths whose young emit chemicals causing the ants to carry them back to the nest and feed them until they reach adulthood and fly off.

And there's the infamous "zombie ant" fungus.

Again, the ants probably don't "know" or "care" in any intellectual sense whether it will work, it's simply an idiosyncrasy they picked up. I imagine there are plenty of strange activities ants are evolving to pick up right now that will or wont work to make them more fit to survive.

* The next time you see an ant hill note how well maintained and free of surrounding debris it is.

May be ants are just cleaning so that it wont stink? Coating something else other than an ant and placing it near an ant crowd might answer that I guess. If they carry it away, then they are cleaning stink rather than getting rid of dead ant.

To an ant there's no distinction.

They don't think in terms of "this is stinky/dead", more like "this smells like oleic acid so it goes over there."

FWIW this was tested by putting oleic acid on bits of paper: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6400/112aff930da566312315ef...

They would sometimes carry it to the burial site and other times they would carry it back and treat it as a food item. The "decision" is said to be based on the current "social context" (read: goals of the ant or colony).

Also a note on that poor ant they coated with the stuff; she cleaned herself off and was back to work after an hour or two.

I have always wondered how they transfer such knowledge down the generations and more importantly how they gathered such knowledge in the first place. There is striking similarity between humans and ants in group work and working towards common goals necessary for survival. There are brown and green aphids and ants breeds them keeping a particular ratio - one aphid type makes honey that tastes great for them and the other aphid type with honey not that great but it secrets something onto plants which delays flowering and thus prevents plants from dying off earlier after flowering, thus increasing the value ants extracts from a plant. Think for a moment the steps involved from discovering aphids. They are brilliant!

Whether it is innateness or something entirely different I wouldn't know. But ants are certainly one of the most intriguing subjects I like to read about.

To anyone who's interested in paths, ants, and some similar musings, I'd recommend Robert Moor's book: On Trails (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276431-on-trails).

Does anyone here have an ant farm? Worthwhile? Interesting species?

If you are interested in this topic I would highly recommend The Ants by E.O. Wilson Bert Holldobler. I was lucky enough to observe ant symbiosis in my yard. Their book helped me understand what I saw. I did a write up of it here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie...

FTA: "Ants live symbiotically with other animals as well as plants. For example, 'herder' ants take care of aphids, defending them against ladybirds and 'milking' them."

From Feynman's "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" on the how it might be possible to miniaturize manufacturing:

"What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this."

You are heading towards a search algorithm. That is, a search for the right incentives/disincentives for possibly all of the biological organisms that make up the manufacturing stack. Then the question becomes can you purchase enough Time which is perhaps the key ingredient in search problems.

To be accurate, those are Feynman's words, not mine. Taken from the talk he gave in 1959. He was discussing how to manufacture at the smallest levels. I thought them prescient when I read the "milking" statement in the article.

When I read the transcript of that talk some years ago, I spent some time trying to come to grips with how trans-formative the idea was.

Boy would I love to own that Starbucks franchise!

More seriously though, ants are an interesting mechanism. As a kid I watched them farm aphids on my parent's tomato plants. That really amazed me.

It is interesting that in the Bay Area at least nearly all of the native species of ant are being out competed by the Argentine ants. As far as I can tell the Argentine ants don't cultivate things.

In other news, squirrels plant oak trees (then live in them) and bees pollinate their own food source.

Empire of the ants is a fun piece of fiction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel)

"Leiningen Versus the Ants" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants) is a great short story - also inspiration for the name of the Clojure build tool.

Phase IV is quite good too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV

I thought it was interesting that the ants and the coffee plant are both three million years old.

Imagine if the ants were a bit older if so I wonder if it would be possible they created the coffee plant through selective breeding.

It would be interesting to see what will happen if we send these ants to the space, for how long they can survive. They could be first creatures from the Earth to live on Mars and other planets

And let them mutate, become super intelligent killer giant ants and declare war on earth? No thanks! But seriously, they would probably just die..

Even ants know that coffee is for closers.

Non mobile linque: http://www.dw.com/en/ant-species-cultivates-coffee-for-accom...

Thanks, we've updated the link.

Mods, can we update the link here with the non-mobile version?

http://www.dw.com/en/ant-species-cultivates-coffee-for-accom...

Thanks!

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